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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29825526">to be caught adrift</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgiveness_in_eurydice/pseuds/forgiveness_in_eurydice'>forgiveness_in_eurydice</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Julie and The Phantoms (TV 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>ADHD Willie, Autistic Alex Mercer, First Kiss, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Light Angst, M/M, he/they willie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 20:27:23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,295</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29825526</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgiveness_in_eurydice/pseuds/forgiveness_in_eurydice</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Can I show you something?"</p><p>Or</p><p>A piece of the past, brought into the present.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alex Mercer/Willie (Julie and The Phantoms)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>66</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>to be caught adrift</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>-Title from "This Modern Love" by Bloc Party<br/>-Set post-canon, shortly after Caleb possesses Nick (but no one knows yet)<br/>-It's not explicitly stated but I very consciously wrote Alex as autistic and Willie as having ADHD bc I have to include neurodivergent hcs in all my fics or I will die &lt;3<br/>-Willie uses he/they bc I say so (I think Alex eventually would as well but he's not there yet)<br/>-Some references to injury, canon-typical homophobia, and estrangement from family members, but nothing graphic/extensive at all</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Can I show you something?”</p><p>The words leave Alex’s mouth before he even knows he’s going to say them. He looks over at Willie, next to him on the bench they found tucked behind a quiet street. Once he realizes what he’s said, he expects for a moment to regret it. But the regret doesn’t come. Even with everything that’s gone wrong since he and Willie met, Alex has found that he regrets things a lot less when they’re together.</p><p>Willie turns to look at him, the corner of his mouth turned up in a small smile. “Sure,” he says quietly. His eyes are still slightly red, and he looks, uncharacteristically, a little embarrassed. Alex can tell Willie doesn’t cry in front of people all that often, that he hasn’t had to force himself to make peace with it the way Alex has. Earlier, he apologized for crying, and Alex didn’t know how to respond to that because if there was ever a time to cry it’s right now. Caleb is—not <em> gone</em>, because the club is still running and there’s still a stamp burned into Willie’s skin and a feeling of dread hanging heavy in the air. But no one knows where he is, and Willie informed the rest of them in a soft, tense voice that that can’t be good, that it means he’s planning something. Today, they’ve spent hours searching for him with Luke and Reggie and Julie, and they’re no closer to knowing where he is or what he’s planning or if it’s safe for Willie to be around them. The other three left a while ago, leaving Alex and Willie together, and Willie collapsed and cried and apologized in a way that broke Alex’s heart and reminded him of himself. He doesn’t know how long they have before Willie has to leave, how long it will be before Caleb finds them, and he wants to offer solace or distraction or vulnerability or <em> something </em> while he still can. He stands up and takes Willie’s hand, but doubt creeps in before they can disappear together.</p><p>“Um, I mean,” he says, wincing at how awkward his voice sounds, “we don’t have to if you don’t want to—I mean, there’s just this spot I used to go to, and I thought you might want to…” he trails off, biting his lip. He doesn’t say that he’s scared Caleb will find them if they stay in one place for too long, or if they go to the pier or the museum or anywhere else he’d think to look. Willie already knows.</p><p>“I’d love to,” Willie says, and gives Alex’s hand a gentle squeeze. He’s smiling gently, his eyes still sad and scared, and Alex nods and closes his eyes, and they disappear.</p><p>When Alex opens his eyes, he’s standing on a street that sits tucked away behind a highway, with a stone wall lining one side of it. He knows his family’s house is less than a mile away, and the knowledge twists painfully in his chest, but he takes a deep breath and tugs Willie over to the wall. He swings his leg over the wall and sits down on the rough stone, and after a moment, Willie follows suit. Several feet below, a tiny creek winds through a secluded patch of grass, shaded by trees that rise up above the wall. It’s just as beautiful as ever, a tiny oasis in the middle of a city, and Alex feels his breath catch as he looks down at it. He’s only come here once since his death, more to see if it was still there than anything else. He was mostly expecting it to have been paved over or turned into a building, and seeing it still intact felt—still feels—almost more painful.</p><p>“My sister and I used to come here all the time,” Alex says, and it feels like telling a secret. He hasn’t seen Isabelle since he died. He looked her up, half-considering the idea of visiting her, only to find out that she lives in New Mexico now. It made him cry, and it made him miss this spot. He came here once with the band, and another time with just Reggie, but other than that this spot was always his and Izzy’s. It should feel wrong, he thinks, to let Willie see this part of his life, but it doesn’t. Not at all. Not when Willie is smiling at him, still with the faintest of tear tracks on their cheeks, and they make Alex feel so safe and warm that sharing anything with them could never feel wrong.</p><p>“It’s beautiful,” Willie says quietly. Their arm is pressed lightly against Alex’s, and he can feel them leaning into him just a little bit harder. He returns the gesture, half-leaning his head against Willie’s. A mutual, silent reassurance.</p><p>“Come on,” Alex says after a moment, and with a smile, he slides off the wall and jumps down to the grass below, just barely managing to keep his balance when he lands. Willie jumps down after him and lands much more gracefully, even if his hair does end up in his face (which is way more endearing than it has any right to be). The grass is wild and overgrown, and Alex can hear birds chattering in the trees, and the late-afternoon sun glints against the water of the creek. It’s all so achingly familiar, and Alex thinks of Isabelle. Slowly, he makes his way over to a tree right on the bank of the creek—this is the right one, he’s pretty sure—and runs his hands along the trunk until he finds what he’s looking for. A couple feet above the ground, the letters <em> AJM </em> carved clumsily into the bark—and a few inches below, <em> IDM</em>, carved so messily it’s hard to read the letters. He presses his thumb gently into the A of his initials, feeling something between grief and nostalgia well up in his throat.</p><p>“You and your sister?” Willie says, and Alex flinches slightly, not having realized that Willie followed him over to the tree.</p><p>“Sorry,” Willie adds, smiling. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”</p><p>“No, it’s fine. Um, yeah. We put our initials there when…I think when I was twelve and she was eight.” Willie doesn’t ask any more questions, and Alex is grateful. He hasn’t said a lot to Willie about Izzy—not because he doesn’t want to talk about her, not because she did anything wrong, but because most of his memories of her are painfully tied up with his memories of their parents. He <em> knew </em> Izzy didn’t look at him with the disgust that his parents did after he came out, but the fear and anxiety kept him away from her anyway. He didn’t close off from her on purpose like he did with his parents, but by the time he died he was practically living in the studio with Luke, coming home as little as possible, and Izzy was rarely allowed out of the house. All they had was this spot, and sometimes it felt like they didn’t even have that anymore. He doesn’t regret pulling away from his parents, but he does regret pulling away from Izzy, even if he didn’t mean to. But he’s not ready to say that, not even to Willie, who makes it possible for him to say things he never thought he could. So, with one last flick of his fingers over his sister’s initials, he walks away from the tree, back over to the grass underneath the wall. </p><p>Willie chuckles softly as he looks up at the wall. When Alex looks at him inquisitively, he says, “This kind of reminds me of somewhere I used to go as a kid, too. Back in Charlotte.”</p><p>“Yeah?” Alex says. He turns to face Willie, suddenly very aware of how little he actually knows about their life—or afterlife, for that matter. He knows they’re from North Carolina originally, that their family moved to L.A. when they were in high school, that they’re an only child but they had a cousin who was like a sister to them, but…that’s it. He doesn’t know how long ago they died, or when they met Caleb, or whether they ever came out to their parents. He can’t blame them—he’s shared a little more than Willie has, but there’s a lot he hasn’t said. Not just about Isabelle, but about his parents, the band, the way people treated him in school. He trusts Willie, but he hasn’t shared his life story with them, for the simple reason that a lot of his life story is painful and private, and also that opening up to people isn’t <em> hard </em> for him exactly but it does make him feel raw and vulnerable and a little stupid. Showing Willie his and Izzy’s spot feels like a big deal, and he knows whatever Willie is about to say is a big deal too.</p><p>“Yeah,” Willie continues. His voice is still quiet, almost reverent, but Alex can hear the smile that creeps in as he says, “There was a wall in my neighborhood, kind of like this one, but taller. It was, like, uneven? So it was a lot taller in some places than others. And I’d go there with my friends—well, actually, mostly just my friend Jamie.” Alex doesn’t always pick up on shifts in tone, but the warmth in Willie’s voice when he says Jamie’s name is so evident that even Alex can’t miss it. He’s not surprised when Willie adds, “He was my best friend. I think…I think I was kind of in love with him, actually.” Willie’s mouth quirks up into a small smile, somewhere between melancholy and affectionate. “We’d hang out at the wall and dare each other to jump off higher and higher parts of it, and one time—when I was…thirteen, I think?—I decided to try and skateboard off the tallest part. Mostly because I wanted to impress Jamie. I didn’t even know I liked him then, but that didn’t stop me.”</p><p>“I can’t imagine that went well,” Alex says, smiling.</p><p>Willie grins. “It did not,” he says. “I completely fucked up my ankle <em> and </em> my knee. Had to go to the emergency room.” Alex rolls his eyes affectionately, suddenly overcome with fondness at the image of Willie, already a daredevil at thirteen, landing himself in the hospital for a boy without understanding why.</p><p>They’re silent for a moment, and then Willie gently nudges Alex’s shoulder with their own and says, quietly, “I guess I kind of have a history of doing stupid shit to impress cute guys, huh?” They give him a wry smile, and Alex feels his face flush as he processes what they just said. He just barely manages to stop himself from saying <em> you were trying to impress me? </em> or, even worse, <em> you think I’m cute? </em> And then it occurs to him that he doesn’t even know if Willie is talking about him, even though every available context clue would indicate that they are. And then suddenly he’s wondering how it never occurred to him that Willie offered to bring the band to Caleb for <em> him</em>, that maybe this whole thing was, technically speaking, set in motion because Willie was trying to <em> impress </em> him, not that Alex thinks of himself as particularly worthy of impressing, and—</p><p>“Hot dog? You okay?” Willie says, and Alex blinks, not fully aware that he was getting pulled into an overthinking spiral until Willie’s voice is suddenly pulling him back out.</p><p>“Yeah,” Alex says. “Yeah, sorry. I just got, um, distracted.”</p><p>“I can tell,” Willie says. “You’ve got that look you get when you’re thinking too much.” His voice is full of fondness, and it makes Alex think of that day in the museum, of Willie saying <em> you’re wired a little tight, huh? </em> Willie has never pretended not to notice Alex’s quirks, which, with a lot of people, would make Alex tense up and close off. He’s spent his whole life acutely aware of how weird and nervous and awkward he is, and he usually hates when people point it out because he fucking <em> knows</em>. But with Willie, it’s different, and not just because Alex is kind of head over heels for him. Willie <em> gets </em> it. He’s not high-strung in the same way Alex is, doesn’t seem to have to work quite as hard to navigate social situations, but he’s reckless and impulsive and filled with a weird nervous energy, like he has to keep moving or he’ll drown in his own head. Alex has always kind of felt… <em> off</em>, or at least like that’s how other people see him, and he thinks maybe Willie feels the same way. Like there’s a layout for how people are supposed to act, and Alex is a little to the left of it while Willie is a little to the right. Willie knows Alex is anxious and jittery and bad at reading social cues, and when he acknowledges that, Alex can tell it’s not out of discomfort or condescension, but solidarity. A recognition that for all the ways that they’re different, they’re alike too. </p><p>So Alex doesn’t bristle and pull away like he might have with someone else, just nods and smiles—an admission that Willie is right, that he was, once again, thinking too much. Willie grins, and Alex, not for the first time, almost kisses them. But…they haven’t kissed before, and there’s still an undercurrent of shared anxiety between them, and Alex doesn’t know—never knows—if this is the right time, or if Willie even wants to kiss him in the first place. So instead, he sits down at the edge of the creek and motions for Willie to join him. They sit quietly for a moment, hands almost touching, listening to the quiet chatter of the creek and the muffled noise of the highway. Alex notices Willie looking back up at the wall, the ghost of a smile flitting across their lips, and he’s—not <em> completely </em> sure, but pretty sure that they’re still thinking about the wall they skated off of, back in Charlotte.</p><p>“So,” Alex says after a moment, “Jamie, huh?” He says it without thinking, and cringes slightly when the words leave his mouth, suddenly afraid that it was the wrong thing to say—that he sounds stupid, or it’s not something Willie wants to be teased about—but Willie just laughs softly, nodding as he says, “I don’t think he knew I liked him, which is kind of insane to me. Pretty sure I was more obvious than I’ve ever been about anything else in my life.”</p><p>“Do you…” Alex says, then hesitates. “Um. Do you still, like, have feelings for him?” It feels like maybe the wrong question to ask, but it feels, somehow, important to ask anyway. It’s a little inspired by jealousy—not that he has the <em> right </em> to be jealous, he and Willie aren’t dating, they aren’t <em> anything</em>—but he also just…wants to know. Wants to know more about this beautiful kid who he can’t seem to tear himself away from, even if he wanted to.</p><p>“Nah,” Willie says, so easily that Alex knows immediately that he can’t be lying. “By the time I died I hadn’t seen him in a while, and even before that, I knew it was never gonna happen, you know?” Alex nods.</p><p>“Besides,” Willie adds after a moment, his voice wavering slightly, “I, um…I kind of like someone else now.” Alex’s head snaps up, his eyes widening and face flushing as Willie pointedly avoids his gaze. It’s not that he doesn’t <em> know </em> that Willie likes him—he just doesn’t know for <em> sure</em>, and he’s always been too afraid to assume because he’s been known to misread things a lot and this is too valuable, too important, for him to misread. This is the most concrete confirmation he’s gotten that, yes, there is something between them—but then the overthinking part of his brain kicks in and he starts wondering if maybe Willie <em> doesn’t </em> like him, if he’s talking about someone else, if this is somehow his way of turning Alex down. Alex knows, somewhere deep in the recesses of his brain, that that’s absurd, but he won’t—he <em> can’t</em>—make assumptions. Not now.</p><p>“Um,” Alex says slowly, “just to be clear…when you say you like someone else, you’re referring to…?” He trails off, suddenly unable to look at Willie.</p><p>Beside him, Willie lets out a soft, awkward laugh. “You, hot dog,” they say, and their voice is quiet and nervous, and Alex isn’t even sure he has a heart anymore but he still swears it’s about to beat out of his chest.</p><p>“Cool,” he says, his voice sounding slightly strangled. “Um, that’s…that’s what I thought, but I just…wanted to make sure.” He closes his eyes for a moment, swallows hard, and glances over at Willie as he says, “I, um, I like you too. Just in case it wasn’t obvious.” Finally, Willie turns to look at him, and they look so happy, so <em> fond </em> that Alex briefly wonders if it’s still possible for him to faint now that he’s dead.</p><p>“It was a little obvious,” Willie says with a smirk, and Alex swats at them, his face burning. “But I’m glad you told me,” they add, smirk softening into a gentle smile that Alex can’t help but return. After a moment of hesitation, he takes Willie’s hand, and Willie immediately laces their fingers together, gently running their thumb over Alex’s knuckles. The sun is starting to set, casting soft shadows over their joined hands and sprinkling bits of golden light into the creek. Alex watches the water for a moment, remembers Isabelle wading in it and getting water in her socks. Then he looks back up at Willie, and Willie is already looking at him. He’s smiling, just a little, and a strand of hair has fallen into his face, and he’s beautiful and solid and looking at Alex like he’s <em> worth </em> looking at. Slowly, Alex reaches up to brush Willie’s hair out of his face. He laughs softly, his eyes crinkling up at the corners, and Alex kisses him. </p><p>Willie kisses back with no hesitation, bringing his hand up to cup Alex’s cheek, and Alex can feel him smiling against his lips. They pull apart after a moment, Willie’s hand still resting on Alex’s cheek, their other hands still entwined.</p><p>“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” Willie says, their voice soft and giddy. Alex nods, trying to convey <em> me too </em> because he’s suddenly so happy and warm and overwhelmed that talking seems like too much effort. He leans his head on Willie’s shoulder, and Willie rests their head on top of Alex’s, and Alex closes his eyes, feeling the sun’s warmth slowly fade from his face as the sky darkens.</p><p>He doesn’t know how long it’s been when Willie squeezes his hand and says, quietly, “I have to go soon.” Alex knows—hopes—that this isn’t the last time he’ll see Willie, but the sentence lodges painfully in his chest anyway.</p><p>“Soon,” he murmurs into Willie’s shoulder, “or now?”</p><p>Willie pauses for a moment, and their grip on Alex’s hand tightens. “Soon,” they reply, barely above a whisper, and Alex nods. Soon. But not now. Now, Willie is still here. Alex is still here. Soon—maybe—both of them will be safe, no longer at risk of being gone forever. For now, they’re still in danger. But they’re here, and the sun is setting, and right now that feels like enough.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>-This is honestly 3000 words of borderline-incoherent rambling but I hope you like it anyway &lt;3<br/>-In case you're curious about the initials: I decided Alex's full name is Alexander Joseph Mercer, and his sister's is Isabelle Diane Mercer<br/>-I have no idea if this kind of spot actually exists in LA bc I have never been there but I imagine something like it probably would? Also I know the whole spot still being there after 25 years is maybe a little far fetched but just go with it &lt;3<br/>-Come find me on twitter (@phantasmapopuli) or tumblr (@skyhighlesbian)!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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